Focus on The 90%

I might be jumping a little ahead with this post (I had a roadmap of articles to write) but I’ve had something on my mind over the last ten days on my still unfinished road trip through New England.

I’ve mentioned that, unlike a marketer, a Growth Hacker doesn’t settle for the product he’s dealt. He adjusts it to find the perfect product/market fit to achieve growth.

A Growth Hacker measures everything and should know what features of their product are used 90% of the time. Accordingly, you should adjust your product to make sure that it is as easy as possible to use those features. They will also be closely knitted to or part of the “ah ha!” moment when value is created for a new user during the onboarding process.

As I’ve experienced as both a user and a product manager, adding more features to your product (when not done properly) can ruin the user experience if it distracts or makes using that “90%” more difficult.

You might be wondering why I’ve wanted to write about this… It stems from daily frustration with the Tom Tom GPS app for iOS during my recent roadtrip. I’ve included a video below that explains why I believe that the UI/UX on that app is horrible. Granted, it has way more features than Apple Maps and even Google Maps for iOS but it does so by ruining the most important features which are mapping, real-time navigation and directions to searched points of interests.

Although I don’t mention it in the video, we even started a game in the car with Tom Tom and it’s inability to find a Taco Bell. 5 out of the 6 Taco Bells it gave me directions to didn’t actually exist. On the bright side, at least it didn’t send me on an airport taxiway.

Are there any applications you have to use but wished that the UI/UX was so much better? Tell me about it in a comment below.

Additional info added after trip: I’d used Tom Tom a couple of times in the past but I relied on it continuously for 2 weeks for this trip. We drove nearly 3,000 km with it during this trip. My girlfriend who has used it even more than me during this trip is very tech-savvy and very much a power user (we met in a PHP class back in College 5 years ago) so her horrible experience is not related to any inability of hers to understand software.